Our Enterprise server offers the perfect platform to pull data from an OpenEdge app and distribute it as actionable intelligence to any device across the web. Many of our customers already use it by hosting a server themselves. However, for smaller organisations, the cost required to host and maintain their own server makes it a much less compelling offering. Which is a shame, because often these customers would benefit the most from our technology. So, for some time now, we’ve been pondering on the best way to offer DataPA OpenAnalytics as a hosted service. The hard part was how to connect the largely on premise OpenEdge databases, securely and efficiently across the web.

The AppServer Internet Adaptor (AIA) was the obvious answer, but it has always been time consuming and difficult to implement, which kind of defeats the object of offering a hosted solution.

So it was, a little over a year ago, that we became pretty excited when we first heard of the Pacific AppServer. Built on Apache and Tomcat, it was billed to offer a self-contained, stand-alone AppServer module that could be easily distributed to any platform supported by OpenEdge. This sounded like the perfect solution. Roll forward a few months and DataPA OpenAnalytics now includes native support for the Pacific AppServer, and we’ve spent a few weeks testing it out. Taking the simple and secure connectivity across the web as a given, the most exiting benefit from our perspective is the performance. We saw queries on average take less than half the time they took via the AIA.

So we have to give a big thumbs up to Progress. In our opinion the Pacific AppServer could be the biggest game changer the OpenEdge platform has seen for some time. For us, it means in the coming months we can offer companies with an on premise OpenEdge app a way of securely distributing their information to any device anywhere, with very little effort or cost. We’re looking forward to watching what others make of it.